Praefatio: A Novel (7 page)

Panic. My dad had used a jingle I’d written in an ad for his auto repair chain.
Need it done right? Need it in a hurry? Pick up the phone, have no worries. At Miller Auto Shop: we fix it right.
It was hardly a real song, just a cheesy jingle. I did get paid for it, though, and still received “royalties.” Dad paid me fifty dollars for the jingle and twenty-five dollars each month it aired. That was our deal. I think he only did it to get out of having to give me a real allowance.

I turned my head into the pillow, embarrassed at the thought of being disqualified and horrified that Gavin had actually heard the jingle. My body was hot, and my head felt stuffed, like my brain was too large to fit into the cavity tasked with containing it. Swollen glands felt like they were bulging out of my neck.

“Have you been here long?” I was thrilled he had come back, even if it meant I was going to be shipped downstairs as soon as my injuries healed. His words came back to me: “You’re not going mad.”

Another slight smile turned up at the corner of the left side of his mouth. He leaned in toward me so that his face was a few inches from mine.

“Yes. I’ve been here for the past two hours. And, Grace, you’re not insane.” He reached under the barely-there hospital-issued covers, and I froze. He felt around for my hand and took it in his. “You won the contest, I swear, but the jingle thing does in fact disqualify you. I’m sorry about that. I wish I had better news as far as that is concerned. But … ” He paused and gazed into my eyes with a look the devil would have been jealous of. I felt my chest rising and falling in a fit of excitement and was immediately embarrassed. “I’m here for you … because you were promised to me,” he offered plainly, no hint that any further explanation was coming.

He smelled good. It reminded me of the sandalwood incense my dad used to burn in his shop, mixed with the scent of the yuzu juice he often drank. The juice was disgusting—sour—but the scent was citrusy and intoxicating. I let his smell have its way with my nostrils.

I exhaled. He kept looking at me, slowly inspecting my eye, cheek, then eyebrows … wait. He stopped, and I freaked ’cause he was staring at my mouth. He seemed to examine each lip intently, as if one could exist without the other.

“I … I don’t know what to say.” I wanted to ask how he knew my mother. From Broadway? That had to be it. Celebrities all know one another; I think they may even have the same management company, come to think of it.

I wanted to tell him I saw him talking to my father, who happened to be dead. I wanted to tell him I had seen Remi spread wings made from fire right before I landed in this room. But how could I?

“What do you feel when you look at me?” he asked. There was a strange sense of urgency to the question. Careful not to respond with “crazy” and the desire to declare my irrational love for him—for his voice, I closed my eyes. If it was at all possible that I was perhaps
not
crazy and I really
was
talking to Gavin Vault and he
was
in fact the voice in my head all those years, I couldn’t risk screwing things up. The truth was that I’d loved
Him
since
He
’d first spoken to me as a kid—but I’d had no idea
He
was Gavin Vault. And now that I had a face and a body to go along with the voice, I wasn’t sure that I loved Gavin Vault.

“I’m drawn to you. It feels like I’ve known you my entire life. I … don’t want to be … without you.” I lowered my gaze, ashamed of how much I’d revealed and angry with myself for even having such feelings.

He didn’t move an inch. I assumed he was weighing my words against the loud thumping of my heart and the strain in my voice. I clutched the white blanket to my throat with my free hand. My cheeks burned with turmoil as I waited for his response.

“You have,” he declared, despite the fact that I’d only met him minutes ago. Perhaps it was Gavin who was insane.

The weight of his words forced tears from my eyes. Years of second-guessing myself and worrying about my sanity came crashing into the room in waves of hysteria as I cried all I had wanted to since he first spoke to my mind.

“Grace,” he began while wiping my face with his free hand. “I know you must want answers to the impossible things you’ve seen. I can’t imagine how vulnerable you must be feeling. Somehow I think you know that everything you seek answers for is right here and here.” He placed his index finger in the center of my forehead on the first “here,” paused, then rested it in the dead center of my chest on the second. I was too stunned to move, breathe. “The only thing between you and the truth you seek is fear. You’re not crazy. You’re just too terrified to accept what you already know. When you find you
are
ready, I will be waiting for you.”

He released my hand, leaned over, paused, and kissed my forehead, then my nose.

I whispered, desperately short of breath and sniffling, “Where will I find you?”

“Listen for me, as always.” His voice was gentle, but also somehow foreboding, as if he were a beast trying to convince an unsuspecting girl to enter the forest with him. I shivered from a sudden chill and pulled the covers tighter around my neck. There was so much I wanted to ask, but he stood and left me alone with only his words to ponder.

Sleep evaded me for a long time. I could still smell him, and when I closed my eyes, I could feel his lips on my forehead and the bridge of my nose. I accepted my insomnia along with its companion, the flu. There was no fight in me.

Knives, no, knives and hammers … and fire attacked my sides and back with crushing force. Someone entered the room, but I was listless, unable to respond.

The person shoved a thermometer under my tongue. Beep. Archaic.

“One hundred and nine point one. It’s going up.” The woman’s voice was odd.

“X-ray?” Another woman. Stronger. Assured. “It’s impossible for her fever to be this high and for her to still be conscious. Where are the labs?”

Paper shuffling.

“How could she have broken all of her ribs?”

More paper shuffling.

“Nothing except a high white blood cell count, fever, and broken ribs? No discernible infection? Something’s wrong.”
Duh.

I spent the next hours in a state of listless fever, ache, and torturous pain. My lips cracked from dehydration as my veins rejected the fluids they tried to give me. Eyes that alternated between open, closed, dazed, and runny deceived me by seeing double, triple, or sometimes not at all. Whatever thoughts bothered to invade my stuffed head were incoherent at best.

The Larsons still hadn’t arrived. Other than Gavin Vault, Dead Dad, and Abandomom, no one had come to visit me. And I wasn’t even sure about the last two.

***

The same nurse came and went. She asked nothing, nor did she offer me any medicine. She only stared and said to no one in particular, “You’ll be just fine, things are going to work out—you’ll see,” or my personal favorite, “Just you wait, the worst is yet to come.” She was taller than me, though that’s not saying much since I’m only five foot three on a holiday, when I am in a great mood, the sun is shining, and I’m whistling Dixie. Her voice was like silk—smooth—regardless of what she was saying.

She would check my morphine and temperature, then shake her head from side to side as if none of her efforts to fix me were working.

When she wasn’t coming or going, she was permanently parked at my bedside. Odd as it was, I liked knowing she was there. I wasn’t sure if it was the morphine or my craziness, but I could have sworn she was writing in the same book Remi had given me. The book had to be years old—like hundreds, maybe thousands. When she didn’t know I was looking, I watched words magically appear on its pages as she read.

Time moved in slow motion. My visions, time zips, and memories had stopped. The one day I wanted them, even needed them, they wouldn’t come. Without my flashes, I had no Remi, and without Remi, I was alone. Why hadn’t he come to visit? Why was I unable to hear him? And Gavin. What was he hoping I would learn? When would I see him again? The questions made my head and ribs ache even more.

I stared blankly at the white walls around me, imagining vivid colorful paintings, like those you might find in the
Basilica di San Pietro
in Rome.

I was never particularly religious and had stopped going to church when I was seven. Even so, my dad made sure we continued to attend Sunday school until I turned nine. I always found logical holes in what we were taught. Let me just say: The kid who finds holes in the story is not the most popular kid in Sunday school.

Whenever I asked Dad about something that made little sense to me, he would scrunch his eyebrows, the way he did on the rare occasion that I had frustrated him, and say, “You should know, you were there.” I thought it was a ruse to get me to pay more attention. But I thought I
had
been paying attention.

Memories of my dad brought a smile to my face. I opened my eyes. The angels I thought I was only imagining were moving, walking toward a crowd of more angels, slowly, deliberately. I shook my head in fear and disbelief and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the angels were still there. In the garden I’d visited.

Oh my God. Mom?

Mom stood with her right arm outstretched. “Walk with me, Grace,” was how it sounded. I couldn’t tell since I was still unsure at this point if it was a vision, a dream, or a complete psychotic break from reality.

I climbed out of bed, and despite my fears, reached out to accept her hand. It hurt when I reached out.
Are my ribs broken in my dream too
? Mom chuckled as though she could hear my thoughts.

“Mom? Where are we?”
Unflippingreal.

“The Garden, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? Who are you, and what have you done with my mother?

She turned to face me and suddenly became very serious and maternal. It was more than I could take, especially her all-white getup. Maybe this was a dream after all, and I was seeing her as I wanted her to be, not as she actually was. She
never
wore white. She used to say it was a very unflattering color, even for babies.

Her yellow hair seemed golden with all that light shining down on it, or maybe the light was emanating from her. She looked like a superhero.

“Grace, I have so much to tell you and very little time,” she began. She took a quick breath, then readied her next line as emotion clouded her face. “First, I love you. I love you like my own daughter, and have always thought of you as mine.” She hurried on as if she were afraid I would stop her. Shock nearly paralyzed me, though my ribs continued to hurt. “Your mother, Rosa … your birth mother, I’m afraid I don’t know
where
she is. Gabriel … Gabe wanted to tell you sooner, but we had to wait until the time was right. I know you think I was hard on you, that I did not like you. But I was only trying to protect you, to make sure that when this day came, you would be strong enough to hear what I have to say—what you need to hear. I could not form a bond with you, or allow you to form one with me.” She stopped talking—finally, but she wasn’t done.

What was she talking about? My birth mother? Rosa
. I felt dizzy. It was too much all at once. I couldn’t look at her. Mom and Dad had always talked about Remi’s heritage. Never was there any indication that I wasn’t her daughter. I refused to look at her.

“Look at me, Grace!” she insisted sternly, as if chastising me for failing to clean my room. For all the crap, backtalk, drama, and disrespect I’d given her, she’d never once spoken to me in that tone. She chose then to do it. She should have slapped me. Would have been easier.
Unfriggingbelievable
.

No words. None. All my anger liquidized. Blinding tears filled my eyes, pooled, then tumbled down my raging-hot cheeks as if pushed to the floor by the middle school bully. I fell to my knees in pain. My sides and back exploded in crushing agony, muscles, bones, and joints all protesting. “Misery,” “waste,” and “orphan” were the words that invaded my mind. My mother, whom I couldn’t stand all those years, wasn’t even my real mother. I’d wasted so much anxiety and energy on not liking someone who had
tried
to get me to dislike her. The joke was on me.

My mother placed her hand on the top of my head, then moved it to my cheek, then arm. “Gabriel and I are angels sent to protect and guide you. We were to ensure that you actually made it to your seventeenth birthday, alive and untouched by the Fallen Ones, or worse, demons. But then they attacked, sooner than we expected,” she said quickly as her touch calmed me.

She got my attention when she mentioned demons. I wiped my tears and stood, slowly, not feeling too alive or untouched.

My mother spun the tale I’d been waiting all my life to hear. She never made mention of the fact that, despite claiming to be charged with my protection, she had abandoned me twice.

“Grace, this is serious. You mustn’t trivialize it. They are not going to stop coming after you. They want you on their side, or dead. And if you choose them, you are as good as dead anyway. You are what the prophecy foretold. Our hope rests with you.” The sternness in her tone matched the wrinkle in her brows.

“So … this is all real?” Terror and elation battled within me.

She smiled briefly and continued. “Your birthmother, Rosa, is a seraph, a High Angel, and was once the most beloved of our kind. But she became unhappy and asked The Divine One for a daughter. He blessed her with twins.” She paused so I could absorb the punch that had just been delivered to my gut. She always did that when she said something I would have trouble getting behind. Her pitying smile provided little comfort. Then my thoughts turned to Gavin and Mom’s face darkened for a second. “A short time later, The Divine One asked Rosa to offer a daughter to fulfill a prophecy. She agreed. She then Fell for the sole purpose of bearing you here on earth, though many say it was done out of love for The Divine One. Still, she did so unselfishly and never asked for anything in return. He afforded her Divine Grace so she wouldn’t suffer the fate of the other Fallen who had left their posts for more dubious reasons. No one has seen or heard from her since. From what anyone can tell, she has stayed to herself and not gotten involved with the Fallen, with whom you may
already
be familiar.”